As you can see, we don’t use the freezer for much. Usually just stock, a giant bag of my favourite dried chillies from the Asian Grocery, cold packs and a beast. This is a fat lamb from my sister-in-law’s farm, a whole one, 25 kilos.

We’ve had braised shanks and ridiculously tender and juicy cutlets, and there’s a lot of baggies left in there. I reached in and grabbed one this morning, and when I work out what it is it’ll be dinner for tomorrow.

yaaay pet lamb lucky dip. last time in NZ, The dr and i were high up in Nelson Lakes area, on the edge of national parks and i helped with the slaughtering and butchering of a lamb (poor lamby had been running around with the name goulash). not a process for the faint hearted. i guess the highlight for me was carving slices off the still steaming liver and braising them in butter, absolutly delish. the weirdest bit was having to fight off the european wasps who all wanted a bit of the action.
alas we too were without the spa action, but there was much fussball.

Ohhhhhh. My dream place. My brother used to have a property “tenants in common” in the State forest near there. The house there was pretty basic, too- wooden hippie shack with pot belly stove, deep in a gully. They had an old cast-iron bathtub in a pretty spot outside with an old copper with which you could heat up water for the bath.

I miss it. It’s always been my dream to live one day in a place like the one in the picture, but now I’m older unfortunately I’m too aware of all the pitfalls that go with it, so it’ll probably never happen.

You know what sucks? When you open the freezer to find out your ROTTEN TODDLER has TURNED THE GODDAM FREEZER OFF AT THE POWER POINT. That deeply sucks and you may find it hard to be nice to him for a bit.